One of Everything: June

We are now halfway through the year and on the other side of a diabolical heat wave that made me long to be on the West Coast. We bought a Switch 2 from my coworker, a purchasing decision that was driven by a feeling of “when the supply chains stop working, at least we’ll have handheld video games” as well as the perhaps misguided feeling that I was “investing” in my “freelance career.” I’ve played Mario Kart because that’s the only game for the system right now. I will probably also pick up the FF Tactics and Sky FC remakes in the fall, but other than that I’m a little perplexed by the role this small, expensive computer will have in my life. Also stymied by the role of games at all right now, TBH.

In the heat I’ve mostly been reading and making this lentil salad. Due to some pending life updates I hope to be doing more playing and writing about indie games this summer, so editors, get in touch!

Comic

Clair De Lune

I forgot about all the comics from the Shortbox Comics Fair that I had downloaded on my computer since October. Most of them are quite long, but I decided to try this one without remembering the description. I love the way Xulia Vicente draws facial expressions, especially noses and eyes. Their costume sketches are really inspiring. A short and quick comic about musical rivalry; for some reason the main character reminds me of Laguna from Final Fantasy 8 (maybe because the other character is a pianist.) I recommend reading about the artist’s process on tumblr, it made me realize the color in the comic was tied to the scenes with music. I hope to read more of my Shortbox pdfs soon.

Game

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time

A new Level-5 game, my favorite studio of perhaps all time, was cause for mild celebration when it came out a month ago, but I thought I’d probably pass until I heard about how well it was reviewing. I was attracted to the concept of gameplay that bled into the various aspects of itself without interruption. You can play one of Fantasy Life’s 14 lives and switch to the other with only a button press, and each “thing” you get in a life (chopped wood, monster parts) is materials for another. And it’s true; playing the non-main-story parts of this game feels like slipping into a different form of consciousness. Never have I felt such a short distance between the action and result of my virtual work.

Once you play Fantasy Life i for a while though, it starts feeling like a single-player MMO. (And yes you can do multiplayer, but I don’t want to.) Once I realized I was leveling all my lives up inefficiently, and it would probably take me months, not an exaggeration, to get them all to max, the shine wore off for me. I don’t like the tri-part structure as much as some other people do, although it’s designed with the same interlocking elegance as the lives are. I think the story is bad, though told with self-awareness that this is so.

It’s played out to say the game steals time just like its title. I think in a “value for money” perspective, this game is worth it if you love MMOs, are a kid whose parents can only afford one game for your birthday, or if you are a Level-5 fan like me (even the glossed-up art style has many of their usual elements still present, like the character noses). The hamster-wheel checklist design took a long time to feel hollow to me, tens of hours before the loop became more boring than interested, so that there’s no world where I can’t say the game isn’t a “great value.” But it felt a bit sinister well before it felt empty. Sometimes I do want a podcast game where I can chop trees and level up every couple of minutes, but when I completed a section and thought “surely this is it” only to open a new batch of recipes, systems, or areas, it began to feel Sisyphean. Speaking of which…

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth

After 102 hours, I finally finished the game I was playing in the background for five months. In a similar way to Veilguard last year, this is a game I didn’t love but became fond of due to the circumstances in which I played it. Thinking about all that’s happened since January, I feel similar to what Brendan Hesse describes in his video about Rebirth. It’s certainly not a perfect game, and I put it down for weeks at a time because I got fatigued from trying to do all the side quests, something the game encourages you to do and that you should absolutely not do. At the same time as I resent Rebirth for making me do so much zero-calorie fluff, I felt glimpses of the pacing and story-focus of Remake every few hours and especially at the end of the game, which made a famously esoteric story even more so, and that kept me in it until I was done. I am a fan of where the story is going, but can only hope they ditch the open world stuff and make a game of hallways for the third one (I am 100% serious).

Granblue Fantasy Relink

I think I just can’t do straight-up action RPGs. I tried Tales of Arise, Atelier Ryza, Genshin Impact, and now Granblue Fantasy Relink. The world in 3D ARPGs always ends up feeling empty, with just me and a few dozen quest markers scattered around a “town” with “people in it” that i find myself wishing was just a nice pre-rendered background. But the open spaces always look so expansive in the trailer, and that’s what gets me to try it.

If we want a real example of the “turn your brain off” game, this is it. (Until you get to combat strategy at least.) You can skip cutscenes and get a one sentence summary of them instead. You can instantly warp back and forth between story checkpoints and quests in town. Which actually makes me appreciate the mega backtracking Fantasy Life I makes you do, because why am I in this beautiful world if I can get by only seeing the areas of it I can warp to?

The combat is really fun. It doesn’t feel like Genshin at all; it reminded me of Xenoblade 3 but without teammate switching. But Xenoblade has a great story; Granblue doesn’t try to hide its so-so one, but it does project a depth of exploration that I just couldn’t find.

I just realized all these games have “fantasy” in the title. Something something escapism…

Book

Ancillary Justice

This series makes me feel like when I was 12 and got the Hunger Games from the library. Now I have a full trilogy + to lose my mind over. A sci-fi book that came out in 2013, Ancillary Justice is about a conscious imperial spaceship that got trapped in a human body. The first book is almost all setup for a revenge plot. It’s interesting to read a book from a decade ago where the main character is so amoral (at least in her actions, because she’s an artificial intelligence) and think about what the response would have been at the time. It really leans into the morally grey/no one is a hero side of things and every chapter made me want to start the next one immediately. Leckie’s writing is very forward-moving despite being very dense and in some senses grammatically complex (the narrator’s language uses the same pronouns for everyone but the other characters’ languages don’t.)

I don’t like “hard” sci fi, normally, but I think this is one of my new favorite books. I’m going to reserve the sequel from the Brooklyn Public Library right now.

Other

Melona Fruit Bars

I’m buying these popsicles every week now that it’s summer. You can find them at H Mart, but I get them at the latin American grocery store. My favorite flavors are ube and honeydew.

Favorite Thing I Wrote

My indie game roundup at Unwinnable. I especially recommend Formless Star and the demo for Consume Me.

Favorite Thing I Read

Alistair Kitchen, "How My Reporting on the Columbia Protests Led to My Deportation."

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